Ben Vinson III is professor of history and Director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico, Flight: The Story of Virgil Richardson, A Tuskegee Airman in Mexico, and coauthor of African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Matthew Restall is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Restall is also the author of Invading Guatemala: Spanish, Nahua, and Maya Accounts of the Conquest Wars (coauthor), Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, The Maya World, and The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatán.